


the last day of my adolescence

by dongtian (seclusion)



Category: Chainsaw Man (Manga)
Genre: M/M, their ship name is akihiro because i said so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 23:55:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29500950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seclusion/pseuds/dongtian
Summary: You are a platitude of mistakes. He visits you anyway.
Relationships: Yoshida Hirofumi/Hayakawa Aki
Kudos: 7





	the last day of my adolescence

He smells like jasmine. He brings Aki jasmine milk tea too, cup size small, thin straw. The plastic top somehow always, without fail, has a pink octopus printed on it. A childlike design. Aki stabs the sharp end of the straw into the cup with his one hand by holding it between his knees, condensation wetting the fabric. It’s sweet, flowery, thin and transient. It slides down his throat too easily, and it’s gone before he’s had his fill. 

The scent of him lingers, unlike the boy himself. Aki loves quick. A boulder gaining speed as it tumbles down a mountain, the flurry of an avalanche. Quanxi’s sword, striking.

✣

When Aki wakes up, Yoshida’s there, holding his exam prep book. The sunlight on the white hospital sheets turns them orange, and a single glance at the nondescript clock mounted on the wall tells him that it’s already seven. 

“I got a large size this time,” Yoshida says without preamble, placing his pencil in the dip where page meets spine. He lifts the cup from the nightstand and immediately sets it down again, wiping the cold moisture collected on his palm on his suit pants with a frown. Aki surmises that he must’ve been sitting there for a while; all the fog on the outside of the slim cup has beaded up and dripped down in crooked rivers, leaving a circle of water. 

Running a napkin along the side, Yoshida hands it to Aki. It’s seven-eighths full, a striped straw already stuck in. Yoshida reads the look on his face and smiles. “I got thirsty while waiting for you to wake up, so I drank some. You don’t mind, do you?”

Aki shakes his head. No, he doesn’t mind, even though there’s also a water dispenser right outside the door. It’s already strange enough that Yoshida visits him so often; the milk tea just makes it more peculiar. He hasn’t dared to ask why.

“Thank you,” he says, as always. The flavour is lighter, diluted by the melted ice. “You don’t have to do this.”

The smile hasn’t gone from Yoshida’s face. It looks a little like Makima’s. Empty. “I want to, though.”

“Don’t you have final exams coming up?” Aki eyes the textbook, wondering at the upside-down formulas printed in varying shades of yellow and green. 

“I’m studying,” replies Yoshida with a confusing amusement, and Aki watches, slightly bewildered, as he picks his pencil back up and begins scrawling on the page. 

He doesn’t know what he’s writing, and it’s not just because it’s upside-down; even if he turned it right side up, Aki wouldn’t know if the formulas were chemistry or physics equations. Hell, he barely knows middle-school algebra. Give him a graph and he’d be flummoxed, not to mention interpreting weird symbols. 

Aki settles for watching Yoshida instead, since he’s got nothing better to do. The hospital is a good hospital; clean, quiet, overwhelmingly boring. If he’s not eating, he’s staring off into space or sleeping. He can almost feel his muscles shrinking by the hour. 

Orange swims across his features, filling in the darker shadows with rust. Yoshida’s white school jacket becomes a light marigold, the soft sheen of polyester reflected. The black earrings lined along the outside edge of his left ear glint, a hint of flame. There’s hardly a trace of his devil hunter status; he simply looks like a high school boy, lost in his own mind. 

He looks peaceful. It’s exactly what Aki wants, for Power and for Denji. 

“You’re sad,” Yoshida murmurs, no doubt no lie. No lies, no hesitation. He rolls the pencil back into the center and closes the book with a snap. It’s placed back onto the nightstand, right beside the rickety lamp.

“Am I?” Aki asks, rhetorical. With his only hand he raises the straw to his lips and sips again, a larger gulp. Again, until all he can smell and taste is jasmine up to his ears. He hasn’t gotten bored of it yet; it’s better than the sterile, headache-inducing air of the hospital. 

Yoshida’s head falls forward, until he’s bent in half from the waist, face pressed into the mattress. “You’re twenty, right?”

“Around that, yes.”

One eye blinks up at him. “Old man.”

“I’m only three years older than you,” Aki contradicts, smiling. Yoshida smirks, like that’s the response he wanted, and crawls onto the bed. 

Jasmine is muddling his head, sinking his head underneath a pond. Bubbles rise from his mouth and pop on the surface. Aki watches through the refracted light, hard orange spilt, as Yoshida inches closer and straddles his waist. 

“You shouldn’t,” he protests, but it’s perfunctory, and this is the most of anything he’s felt since — getting his arm sliced off, making a third deal with a devil, losing Himeno. His heart is functioning. His heart is exploding. 

“You shouldn’t,” he says again. “I smoke.”

Yoshida huffs, face only centimeters away. There’s a small mole on the right side of his face, and when he’s half-lit from this angle it stays dim. Everything’s distorted in the water, shimmering and inconsistent. The weight of him is grounding. “So do I.”

Liar. It’s all the evidence on him: his clothes, his shampoo, his skin. There’s not even a wisp of smoke left on him that can be detected from Aki’s nose, and he’d know. He had Himeno as a partner, after all. 

“I’m an old man,” he whispers. He’s never left Japan. “Nineteen and dead. You want a corpse?”

Yoshida leans down, pressing his ear against Aki’s chest. He’s closer than ever, and Aki’s lungs are bursting into full bloom, tiny white buds opening in the dark cavern of his ribs. He takes Aki’s hand and places it on Aki’s own chest, so he can feel his heartbeat. It’s steady, if not a little fast. 

“You’re alive, see?”

Yoshida stares up at him, cheek plastered to Aki’s shirt, adamant. Aki wants to breathe him in forever. Find out if his seven earrings are plastic or metal with his tongue, and if he’s truly studying or just messing with him. 

“I’ll die soon,” he tells him, utterly factual. 

“I know,” Yoshida laughs back, eyes bright. He doesn’t look like Makima anymore. “Me too, Hayakawa. Me too.”

The cup of jasmine milk tea is put directly on top of the textbook. Aki doesn’t stop to complain that the water will ruin the cover; Yoshida tastes like the tea he just drank, and his seven earrings are metal. 

✣

At Yoshida’s retreating back, jacket no longer orange but deep blue, Aki says, “Don’t come back.”

Yoshida turns around. He is all at once plunged into the night water, the shadow and the antithesis, hair dark legs dark. Face, light. “You can’t stop me.”

The door closes; silence. Aki slumps into his pillow, loving as quickly as the earth spins, jasmine thick on his tongue. 

**Author's Note:**

> ["He has a tendency to get attached to others easily",](https://open.spotify.com/track/4ukEWFubsy87f0iib6ED1L?si=58afa1bc566a4d37%22) says the [wiki.](https://chainsaw-man.fandom.com/wiki/Aki_Hayakawa#History)


End file.
